Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia

The New York Times ^ | November 14, 2001 | NEIL A. LEWIS

[Pericles]

November 14, 2001

Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia

By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — Officials of the United States Holocaust Museum said today that they had discovered and preserved a cache of decaying documents and artifacts from one of the lesser-known but most brutal concentration camps of World War II. The camp, known as Jasenovac, was operated in Croatia by the Ustasha, the Nazi puppet government.

The artifacts were found deteriorating in a building in Banja Luka in the Serbian part of Bosnia last year, officials said.

Peter Black, the museum's chief historian, told reporters today that Jasenovac was crude in comparison to the industrialized Nazi extermination camps like Auschwitz. Mr. Black said there were no gas chambers or crematories, so prisoners were murdered one by one with axes, guns, knives or prolonged torture. Bodies were buried or thrown into the adjacent Sava River.

Jasenovac (pronounced ya-SEN- oh-vatz), actually a complex of five camps about 60 miles from the Croatian capital, Zagreb, has been little studied in the West, but the history has long resonated in the modern Balkans, where analysts and historians have debated about how much of the region's violence may be traced to historic ethnic enmities.

Mr. Black estimated that nearly 100,000 people had been killed in Jasenovac, the largest number being Serbs, followed by Jews and Gypsies.

The camp was established by the Republic of Croatia to eliminate anyone who was not an ethnic Croatian. Mr. Black said a combination of factors, including the reluctance of officials to agree on what happened, had led to its history's remaining largely hidden from scholars until now.

The collection includes 2,000 photographs, many of atrocities; tens of thousands of papers; and thousands of artifacts, like inmate crafts.

Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum, said the project to save the documents and artifacts was especially significant because of the cooperation of the government of Croatia, whose history is cast in a poor light, as well as the governments of Serbia and Bosnia. Ms. Bloomfield said the governments had cooperated despite "the continuing sensitivity of all sides to this collection."

That sensitivity was on display moments after the museum's presentation today when a diplomat from Croatia, Mate Maras, objected to the assertion by museum officials that more than 300,000 Serbs had died at the hands of the Ustasha throughout Croatia in World War II.

Mr. Maras complained to Ms. Bloomfield and Mr. Black that the number was misleading because it included what he said were combatants throughout Croatia and thus was comparable to the hundreds of thousands of Croats killed in the war.

Mr. Maras said that while he thought the assertions of the museum's personnel about Serb casualties were misleading, he agreed it was "a good day for Croatia to open up these sad pages of our history."

Copies of the collection have been made and will be maintained at the Holocaust Museum and in Israel, officials said. The original collection will be returned to a museum in Croatia, where it will be put on display at the site of the Jasenovic complex, officials said.

[Pericles]

Officials of the United States Holocaust Museum said today that they had discovered and preserved a cache of decaying documents and artifacts from one of the lesser-known but most brutal concentration camps of World War II. The camp, known as Jasenovac, was operated in Croatia by the Ustasha, the Nazi puppet government.

Officials of the United States Holocaust Museum just discovered??? lesser-known????? Were not these officials the same ones that allowed Weaselthal to publicly harangued Clinton (pre-arranged) to attack the Serbs because for some strange reason the Serbs resisted being ruled by Croatians and Bosnian Muslims?

The Jews of America should be ashamed of themselves.

Never Forget??? Depends on who you are remembering.

[AppyPappy]

What do the Jews have to do with this?

[LA-Lawyer]

So when is the ICTY going to charge Milosevic for this crime?

[Pericles]

Jewish groups allowed themselves to be used as props when Clinton was looking to deomonize the Serbs in Bosnia in order to bomb them. The Serbs were called Hitlerian and positioned as genocidal maniacal villains. Go to Google and do a search and see.

[DTA]

>>>>>Never Forget??? Depends on who you are remembering.<<<<<<<<

It's 40,000 slaughtered Croatian Jews who are forgotten today because of political correctness, it will be all 6 million tomorrow. The nazi revisionists could not be happier, victims are doing their own work.

The Nazi revisionism from Official Croatia is sickening. "That sensitivity was on display moments after the museum's presentation today when a diplomat from Croatia, Mate Maras, objected to the assertion by museum officials that more than 300,000 Serbs had died at the hands of the Ustasha throughout Croatia in World War II.

And The Museum estimate is on the low side. The real number is anywhere between 460,000 and according to The Third Reich documents, around 1 million. The real crime is that that number is hard to establish after 50 years of communist hush-up and 10 years' of international media barrage of 'poor Croatians"

“The omission of Croatia from the conventional Holocaust studies is like a book whose first chapter is torn out.”

[DTA]

BUMP

More from JASENOVAC.ORG

[F-117A]

The original collection will be returned to a museum in Croatia, where it will be put on display at the site of the Jasenovic complex, officials said.

More likely the collection will be hidden away or destroyed by the Croats!

[joan]

This article downplays a lot, the number of Serbs killed, for instance:

Holocaust Chronicle:

Serbians: 700,000 (Croat Ustasa persecution)

Also, "Mr. Black said there were no gas chambers or crematories". Not so, according to:

This

Gas chamber -

Jasenovac possessed a gas chamber where inmates were poisoned using sulphur dioxide and Zyklon B gas. Jasenovac survivor Misha Danon recounts the gas chamber as follows:

This room was sealed, so that not a breath of air or a beam of light could penetrate into it. It was,in fact, a gas chamber.Here they killed children of three,five and seven years old,the children of Serbs and Jews, orphaned children.

Survivor Jakov Atijas confirms Danon's account:

Many women and children were? poisoned in special cells (closed rooms) with gas. The gravediggers had to carry out the corpses of those poisoned and either bury them in mass graves or throw them into the crematorium.

Crematorium -

In January 1942, Ivica Matkovic became commander of the Jasenovac camp and with the engineer Hinko Picili converted the tile oven in the factory into a crematorium where corpses as well as living victims were incinerated until May 1942. A black smoke and stench of burned human flesh permeated the region. Sado Cohen-Davko explained that first the inmates were shut in a building beside the crematorium:

Here the prisoners were ordered to strip, in order to bathe and be disinfected. The poor women and children had no idea where they were going. At the exit,behind the door, there stood two executioners with mallets. As each passed through for 'disinfection',he was hit by one with a mallet and another immediately threw him half-dead into the oven. This oven swallowed up a good thousand victims, especially women and children.

Jasenovac survivor Jakov Atijas recalls the crematorium as follows:

There was a so-called 'Black Maria', a closed car that almost every night took away prisoners from the barracks and burned them in the oven like fuel... From the Spring of 1942, they threw the weak and the ill into the brick oven while they were still alive.

Survivor Jakov Kabilj as an eyewitness personally observed:

I myself remained alive, and saw that winter how live people, stiff with cold, were taken under orders and thrown into the brick oven.

The tile oven was divided into several ovens with a common chimney. Each oven could hold 40-50 people. The oven was in a long tunnel and the individual ovens were 3 x 4 x 3 yards. The door was opened from the outside,from the tunnel. In one night, 450 to 600 people were incinerated.

Another mention of crematorium -

Wiesenthal

The crimes of the Ustasha documented by the Zagreb indictment included the murder of hundreds of specifically named Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews; the creation of the Jasenovac concentration camp, where hundreds of thousands of individuals were killed; and the following specific cases of barbarism:

1. tying families by their hands with wire, forcing them into a pit, and cracking their skulls with sledgehammers;
2. operating a crematorium at Jasenovac into which persons were flung alive;
3. herding Serbs into their Orthodox churches ... and then butchering them with knives;
4. medical experiments into the perseverance of human organisms;
5. slitting open the bellies of pregnant women;
6. drinking blood from the slashed throats of the victims;
7. inducing cannibalism among camp inmates;
8. mutilation of the living and the dead;
9. raping schoolgirls before their mothers;
10. catching infants on bayonets;
11. inventing new methods of torture;
12. throwing burning lime on the living in execution pits;
13. feeding food laced with caustic soda to starving children.38

[Doctor13]

Simon Wiesenthal Center
Los Angeles, CA 90035-4792<

RE: USTASHI MURDERS IN WORLD WAR II IN CROATIA

Although exact figures for civilian victims of the Ustashi in the nazi puppet state of Croatia may never be known, the following numbers represent reasonable estimates as determined by reputable, scholarly sources.

Population Jews: 35-40,000
Jews Murdered: 30,000

Population Gypsies: 29,000
Gypsies Murdered: 28,000

Population Serbs: 1,750,000
Serbs murdered: 600,000+
Serbs expelled: 250,000
200,000 Serbs forcibly converted to Catholicism

Aaron Breitbart
Senior Research Associate

[geaux]

I do not understand what kind of person-animal could do those things to other people.

[Leonora]

Especially shame on Eli Wiesel who was the first to jump on the bandwagon to demonize Serbs during the conflict in Bosnia and who promoted the stories of Serbian "concentration camps" in Bosnia.

[Blue_Ridge_Mtn_Geek]

On the contrary, by providing a framework for boosting the public visibility of modern Holocaust Studies, increasing public attention has been given to a broad range of massacres of non-Jews, as well as Jews. Indeed, the Holocaust Museum. and its counterpart in Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance, have been nearly unique in NOT concentrating on only one ethnic group's experiences. It took a few years of prodding and recriminations, but the response of these organizations has been exemplary. As always, there are a variety of counts and claims about the severity of the slaughters. What is quite clear, is that humanity has a long way to go before ethnically and culturally driven mass murder is expunged from the human experience.

It is also clear, however, that, by making this phenomenon of ethnic and ideologically driven mass murder a topic of serious scholarship for all peoples, in their efforts to come to grips with their particular encounter with it in the 20th century, the Jews (as well as other supporters of the Holocaust Museum) have cause for pride, not shame, for their efforts.

[Pericles]

Eli "Weasel"

[FormerLib]

You can't hide from the truth!

[FormerLib]

You remember our friend "ZaDomSpremni," don't you?

[Pericles]

The Holocaust Museum allowed itself to be taken hostage in a staged ceremony designed to link the Serbs with the genoicide of the Nazis. Those Jews at that place at that time FORGOT!

My grandparents survived two holocausts my father one. I will say it again, shame on the Jews of America.

[Leonora]

I would say that blame is more on American Jewish institutions, while most of the individual Jewish Americans were supportive of Serbs.

[Pericles]

Not all Jews should be ashamed, though this article came too late for Bosnia and dealt mostly with Kosovo. I posted this article on Free Republic a while back, but I can't find it in the archives now.

The U.N. War Crimes Tribunal

Commentary by Dr. Gerhard Falk

A tribunal is by definition an impartial agency devoted to adjudicating crimes by anyone against anyone. We should expect that this would be true of “war crimes” as well. Therefore, the religion, ethnic group or nationality of someone who is suspected of a war crime should have no impact on the tribunal's judgment.

This, however, is not the case when it comes to the United Nations war crimes tribunal concerning the former Yugoslavia. That tribunal is nothing more than a “kangaroo court” intent on persecuting, not prosecuting, Serbs on behalf of the Albanian Moslems.

The evidence for this biased and racist approach to so-called justice on the part of the U.N. War Crimes tribunal is the fact that Serbs and only Serbs have ever been adjudicated by that “kangaroo court”. Crimes of the most heinous kinds committed by Moslems and for that matter Germans against Serbs are ignored. The Albanian Moslems are solely responsible for the fighting in Yugoslavia since they, and they alone, attacked the Serb Christian population in an effort to overrun all of Serbia and force their religion on those who don’t want it. Bombings, killings, and indiscriminate murder of the Serb population left the government of Serbia no choice but to protect its people against the violence forced upon them by the Albanians.

These are the same Albanians who marched with the Nazi army into Russia where they murdered thousand of Jews between 1941 and 1943. In addition, the Albanian Moslems formed a special Storm Trooper Unit (SS) which served Hitler by volunteering to go to Salonika, which had the largest Jewish population in Greece. There the Albanians slaughtered thousands of Jews under Nazi supervision. The Albanian SS division was called the Skanderbeg division. Skanderbeg is a corruption of the two Turkish words, Iskander or Alexander and Bey or Master. The Albanian divisions were recruited by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hay Amin, the uncle of Yassir Arafat. This Nazi spent the second world war in Berlin. From there he traveled to the occupied Balkans and organized the Albanian divisions. He also praised “the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere” (meaning Israel) which he hoped the Germans would achieve upon winning the war.

Haj Amin was instrumental in making Albania an ally of the Germans during the second world war. Under German hegemony the Albanians then sought to establish a “greater Albania” including Macedonia and parts of Serbia.

Yet, all these horrors are not crimes because Moslems did them and Jews were the victims. American Jews who today defend the Albanians against the Serbs are murdering their fellow Jews a second time. Moreover, it ought to be evident that the tactics used by the Albanian Moslems in the Balkans are the same that are used by the Palestinian Moslems in Israel. In both cases, the Moslems cause endless bloodshed and then pretend that they are the victims. In both cases the media bad-mouth the victims of Moslem atrocities, i.e the Israelis and the Serbs. In both cases the Moslem terrorists are financed by oil interests who blame the victims and refuse to see the danger of this terrorism to this country as well as the immediate targets.

Those who now blame Slobodan Milosevich for defending his country need to notice that the Arabs and their anti-Jewish friends are claiming that the prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, is a “war criminal”. The analogy is obvious. If Milosevich is a “war criminal’ for defending his people then the same must be true of Sharon as well.

How then can we continue to side with the Nazi Albanians against our own people? Surely even Jewish “liberality”ought to have a limit. Are we such “liberals” that even the slaughterers of our own people gain our support?

Shalom u’vracha.

[Pericles]

I should also add that as of last year the Albanians running Kosovo made it "Jew Free".

[Canuck1]

Wasn't it the same Holocaust Museum that, when it opened in the early 90's, wouldn't include an exhibit on the Ustashi genocide so as not to offend the late Croat president Franjo Tudjman, himself a Nazi apologist?

There must be new management at the museum today. Better late than never I suppose.